This week we wanted to share with you some of the early progress on our new lobby system that should help make matches more fair, more reliable, and more enjoyable. As it stands, the lobby system allows a player to create a lobby, and that lobby shows up on a list for other players to see and join. Once in the lobby, the host has control of the rules and then the game starts with those rules when enough players have joined.

This is all well and fine, but we felt like for the long-term success of this game we needed to implement a more robust system that allows players to see more information about the game they're about to enter.

With the new lobby system, players will be able to see the region, the type of game mode, round limit or length limit, and the "health" of the lobby. This health is related to the connection strength and region, but also to player skill.

This does not mean we'll have skill-based matchmaking (like in a game like Rocket League), but it should help to make games slightly more fair by estimating the skill of the players behind the scenes and baking that into an overall "health" score.

We're going to have to test it quite a bit before we roll it out, and might make it public along with some other changes, so there's no guarantee of how quick you'll see it in-game. Regardless, we wanted to share our progress with you and let you know what you have to look forward to for the future of Ultimate Chicken Horse.